To: GraceZ who wrote (1198 ) 5/13/2003 11:43:33 AM From: zonder Read Replies (1) | Respond to >>>Yeah, well, a shame that it is being challenged now... It seems Einstein was right after all, the the Copenhagen gang just thought there was uncertainty because at the time (seventy years ago) precision instruments just did not exist yet..<<< Bohr insisted that the laws of physics, at the most fundamental level, are statistical in nature. Physical reality consisted at its base of statistical probabilities governed by Heisenberg uncertainty. Bohr saw these uncertainties as intrinsic to reality itself, and he and his followers enshrined that belief in what came to be known as the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum theory. By contrast Einstein famously argued that “the Lord does not throw dice.” He believed that electrons were real and he wrote, in 1949, that he was “firmly convinced that the essentially statistical character of contemporary quantum theory is solely to be ascribed to the fact that this [theory] operates with an incomplete description of physical systems.”They took the limitations of their cumbersome experiments as evidence for the nature of reality. Using the crude equipment of the early twentieth century, it’s amazing that physicists could get any significant results at all . So I have enormous respect for the people who were able to discern anything profound from these experiments. If they had known about the coherent quantum systems that are commonplace today , they wouldn’t have thought of using statistics as the foundation for physics. When Einstein said he didn't think god played dice, he was saying he didn't think the world could be decomposed into "bits". Well then this where we decide its ontology as opposed to epistemology. Not everything can be made discrete or perhaps it can be made discrete yet when you do that it shares none of the same properties as the whole. Life is more then the sum of its parts
